Independent View: Synaesthete's Joseph Tkach

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We talk to the Digi-Pen grad about Borges, Dance Dance Revolution, and making games in the Bahamas.

By Michael Thomsen

Independent View is a new feature on Insider where we'll be sitting down with the best and brightest game designers in independent gaming to get their thoughts on the industry, their peers, and where the medium is headed in the future.

In the movie world, a small handful of film school graduates captured a certain creative zeitgeist in the late 60's and early 70's, ushering in a revolutionary new approach to the medium that celebrated personal expression and daring new camera techniques. In the world of videogames, design schools have slowly been building in number and legitimacy over the last ten years. With the adaptation of the Digi-Pen project Narbacular Drop into Valve's Game Of The Year candidate Portal, there's a compelling case to be made that a similar upheaval is under way in gaming. Synaesthete is one of the latest student projects from Digi-Pen to win its fair share of acclaim, with a gratifyingly hypnotic mix of Beatmania and isometric shooting action. Its surreal visuals, undulating environments, elliptical quotations, and uplifting soundtrack combined to make it one of the most unique freeware games of the year. At this year's Independent Games Festival it was recognized as the best Student Game of the show. We had the opportunity to talk with Joseph Tkach, the game's designer, about his experience in game school, the production of his unique game, and what the future holds for him and his teammates. Here's what he had to say.

IGN: So let's start from the beginning with your choice to go to school. How did you start thinking about Digi-Pen?

Joseph Tkach: Well honestly, I'm really lazy so I didn't even apply to any other schools. I just saw this ad in EGM and I was like, "Oh, Digi-Pen. That could be kind of cool." So I applied and there you go.

IGN: That was when you were in high school?

Jose Tkach: Well, I dropped out of high school actually. I was just kind of chillin', you know, kickin' it for a couple of years. Then my parents were like, "Joe, go to college."

IGN: Had you already started fooling around with code, making Flash games and stuff like that?

Joseph Tkach: Yeah, I'd done a little bit of C++. Honestly nothing that I can feel proud of now, but at the time I thought it was pretty cool.

IGN: Was that a big reason you decided to drop out of high school, you weren't getting what you wanted out of the education?

Joseph Tkach: I went to a really bad high school. I was number one in the class and I was like, "This is stupid." So I just kind of left. I played Starcraft for a year. That was awesome.

IGN: Did you make levels?

Joseph Tkach: Oh yeah, all that stuff.

IGN: Did you learn a lot from Starcraft levels? I know a lot of people have talked about that as an example of building up level design logic and choke points—

Joseph Tkach: I used the tools a lot, but I honestly never finished any maps. It was always like, "I'm going to work on this. I'm going to work on that." But you know, it never quite got there. I played a lot of Defense of the Ancients, the big thing in Warcraft 3.

Joseph Tkach: Yeah, I'd worked on a couple of other games at Digi-Pen. We make a game every year, but Synaesthete was the only one I would show to anyone other than my parents. That was about a twelve month project, a thirteen month project.

IGN: And that was your Senior project, right?

Joseph Tkach: It was actually our Junior project, but we ended up not making another one [for Senior year].

IGN: Where did you get the idea from? It was sort of your baby from the beginning, right?

Joseph Tkach: Oh definitely. I'd always wanted to make a game that played like Windows Media Player. That was honestly the core idea there. Then I saw Geometry Wars and I was like, "It should be like that, only with music." It just kind of evolved out of that.

Joseph Tkach: More DDR than Beatmania. I love Beatmania, but I'm really bad at it.

IGN: It's a brutal game.

Joseph Tkach: Yeah, it really is. I like all music games, pretty much, though. I like Parappa the Rapper, and Bust A Groove, if you ever played that on the PS1. A lot of old school stuff. Amplitude, Frequency. If it's music, I've probably played it.

IGN: Did you ever fiddle around with trying to get the interface for a controller, like the Frequecy thing where you have the three button cues on the shoulder buttons?

Joseph Tkach: Well we actually do support an Xbox 360 controller and we have something very similar to that.

IGN: How does that work? I've only played on the keyboard.

Joseph Tkach: We've had pretty good feedback. I personally don't care for it as much because I like the PC feel. But it has force feedback which I think adds a lot.

IGN: How does that work, though, because the button combos you guys have for the Beatmania tracks—they get really intense. Just for my own skill level I think it would be pretty overwhelming to try and do that on shoulder buttons.

Joseph Tkach: Well we do the A button and the two shoulder buttons. One of the things that kind of works about the game is that you don't have to hit all the notes. It's not apparent from playing it; we try to make it as obvious as we can. You can actually just hit the beat if you want. You can ignore most of the buttons and it doesn't penalize you. You're not really intended to hit them all, that's more like perfect play if you're really just ridiculous.